This invention relates to networking, and more particularly to estimating a sender's congestion window throughout the life of a TCP flow.
In a computer networking environment, users may install and deploy monitoring and/or troubleshooting tools for observation of network traffic and network installation and maintenance. The TCP protocol provides a reliable transport mechanism between two machines on a network. Congestion window is a component in the TCP stack used for transmission flow control by a sender as a result of the sender's discernment of the amount of congestion on a network, whereas flow control by the receiver is accomplished via the advertised window, where the receiver indicates the additional amount of data the receiver is willing or able to receive. It would be useful to be able to estimate the congestion window of a sending device by passive observation of network traffic, a capability which heretofore has not been developed.